CSI Immortality
by Thor2000
Summary: Following immediately the events in CSI Underworld, Grissom and the night shift comb for forensics after gang members open fire in a diner. During the investigation, a character from another case believed dead seemingly returns very much alive.
1. Chapter 1

The Mason Jar Restraunt was located on Canyon Road off Interstate 15 into California south of Las Vegas. Truck drivers often stopped here and so did tourists looking for one last meal after losing fortunes in Las Vegas or going there in hopes of striking it rich. The small restraunt was about the size of a former railroad passenger car with counter seats and tables overlooking windows pointed on the Las Vegas skyline. It was almost the view one might have expected in Ancient Greece as long gone paganists looked up to Olympus or Chinese philosophers looked upon Mount Kun-Lun for advice from their own immortals. Las Vegas beckoned with promises of fortune to many patrons at the Mason Jar.

It wasn't just the view of the neon-lighted sky or the bright Las Vegas landmarks that made many a driver stop here. It was the home-style meals, the celebrity photos autographed by actors and singers and the hope for a really good dessert. Ruby Hollander who owned and ran the place was very proud of her cakes and pastries. The local Canyon Community newspaper had applauded her often for the meals and dinners out of the Mason Jar and the community awards on her kitchen wall were proof that she was very much liked by her patrons and raged upon by her new customers. When she heard that actress Susan Sarandon raged on her diner to her actress friends on Late Night with David Letterman, she knew she was an overnight success. She was running out of space for all the autographed photos on her walls. Several regulars wished she opened another place closer to Los Angeles, but she knew that was impossible; she couldn't control her quality of service from two places at once.

At lunchtime, the line at the door often reached down the street, but an hour to closing, business dropped off and Ruby's daughter, Charity, started washing dishes. A few truck diners crowded at a table in raucous laughter before realizing they'd be hitting the road again. Ruby freely refilled their cups with decaffeinated coffee knowing how to treat her patrons. She laughed out loud to their bawdy jokes and squeezed past her eighteen-year-old niece, Patience, bussing tables.

Another table away, William Pryde and his wife, Prue, sat with their two girls. The younger one fidgeted and the eight-year-old went under the table pursued by her mother. William just studied the map for Anaheim and hoped he didn't get lost along the way again. He had promised his daughters a trip to Disneyland and he was going to get them there. Another restraunt patron salted his fried eggs and sliced them up with his steak. At another table, a gambler named Jerome Howard played with a calculator to perfect his system and paused to mix his peas and asparagus with his mashed potatoes. It was into this family setting that a strange figure invaded looking for solace away from the dust and loneliness of the road. He had arrived by Harley Davidson, a sectioned out chopper with thinning black paint and patched leather seats and entered in faded blue jeans, black t-shirt and dirty leather jacket. Dropping the jacket over his seat at the counter, he stroked his dark goatee and peered over the menu in his fingers with moderate interest. His presence was distant and surly, but Ruby thought she could break that dark exterior and get him to open up like a son.

"Hi." She laid out a napkin with a fork and spoon. "What'll you have to drink?"

"Let's see…" The motorcyclist knew what he wanted. "Steak and eggs, hash browns, side of ham, two pork chops, white rice, stuffing, mashed potatoes, broccoli casserole, squash casserole and a beer."

"We don't have beer here." Ruby answered. The stranger looked back at her as if it was just another disappointment in a long line of disappointments.

"I'll just take some of that coca-cola stuff." He answered. Ruby just beamed friendlily at his massive appetite and didn't worry if he'd eat all of it just so long as he paid for it. Her daughter Charity had emerged from the back kitchen with a glass mug of soda for the figure in black. The dark haired figure took the drink with restrained interest and sipped it as if he wasn't used to it. Faint words mumbled from his lips and he sighed pretending to be interested in the artwork on the menu.

As one patron paid his bill as the register and departed, an open convertible Mustang painted in different shades of blue pulled up outside and its young passengers jumped and scrambled from it lacking in human value or moral ethics. One of his passengers cursed at the motorcycle outside the front entrance while his cronies stormed the restraunt angry at the world for refusing to bow to them. Their undisputed leader pushed ahead as William Pryde looked up and pulled his daughter close to him, but the young punk instead headed straight to the motorcyclist and invaded the tall figure's personal space looking to create an incident.

"Hey, is that your hog out there?" Joey Vasquez sneered with disrespect to the cyclist. "You cut me off at the crossroads."

"You should have stopped at the sign." The motorcyclist answered.

"You telling me how to drive?" Vasquez was backed by Kenny Groth and Frank Wright, two other high school dropouts under the deluded notion that a high school education was a waste of time and fear and intimidation was all they needed.

"Hey," Ruby's husband, Jack Hollander, called through the order window at the pieces of human trash. "I don't want you punks harassing my customers."

"Shut up old man or else I ventilate your stupid trailer!" Vasquez shot a look of human disrespect and turned back to his new source of hated. "How bout it, biker-man? You got what it takes?"

"I'm giving you one chance to walk way." The biker sipped his soda as Ruby waited fearfully to give the man his sizable dinner. "You don't want to go there. How about you do something smart for a change because if you mess with me, you won't see another day."

That was the wrong thing to say in a volatile situation with a teenage youth wanting to die in a blaze of glory. Striking the glass of soda from the man's hand, Vasquez reached to his back as Groth pulled out his choice of a problem-solver in the form of an automatic .38 revolver. Prue Pryde hit the floor under her table as her husband shielded her and her kids. Howard tried to bolt for the door and one of the truckers backed by his peers rushed for the teenage gangster wanna-be. The world was showing another part of its ugly side and as usual it came from one of the inhabitants of it trying to live far beyond it. This was the side that Gil Grissom saw all the time. He served as the janitor who had to clean it up and as the translator who had to decipher it for a society who had not yet understood why it still happened. In this world, there were cast off pieces of former human individuals who forgot they were people and had shed all aspects that had once made them human. Instead of trying to regain the aspects that once made them normal, these former members of the human race instead strove to destroy anyone normal and to eliminate all who got into their path. The once loved site of the Mason Jar was now surrounded by police cars both local and state, five ambulances and three cars from the Criminal Science Lab. Backed by his entire night shift, Grissom and his staff stood as a wall to separate humanity from the underworld that would destroy human society. Catherine Willows looked toward two crying young girls and Sara Sidle started snapping pictures. Nick Stokes struggled to pull on his CSI jacket as Warrick Brown still wondered if things were getting worse. After both Columbine and the destruction of the World Trade Center, he still wondered why there were people who considered human life as disposable objects. Their guide to the scene of human sorrow and degenerated rage was Captain James Brass, a seasoned police officer and former head of the CSI team.

"Eleven bodies…" He tried to stay professional in the face of human sorrow. "Multiple gun shots… it doesn't look any better inside."

"Did Ruby make it?" Grissom asked. Jim choked back on his sorrow; he loved her German Chocolate cake.

"Looks gang-style…" Warrick shone his light on the once exquisite restraunt. The bullet hole riddled interior was dark but barely lit by night filling in through shattered windows and holes in the structure. Solitary hanging lights hung with fragments of shattered neon tubes dangling dangerously. Blinds hung through the open windows thrust out by the volume of gunfire. Broken shards from windows, drinking glasses and overhead lights covered the floor, plates of food and obscured bodies in the presence of sprayed human blood. One human body lay on the floor trapped behind rows of stools and the counter. The figure of a larger trucker laid sprawled out in the walkway near the bodies of the Prydes under a table in silenced repose. The body of Jerome Howard blocked the door from opening another foot.

"Nick, Sara, exterior," Grissom slipped into analytic mode. "Warrick, Catherine, outside in…" He paused and sniffed the air blowing through the opened diner and detected something. There was something else to the crimson scent of blood, aroma of fine dinners, heavy odor of gunpowder and gasoline by the entrance. "Does anyone else smell ozone?"


	2. Chapter 2

PART TWO

Someone finally turned off the electricity to stop the sparks from the bullet ravaged light fixtures. Warrick Brown tagged and photographed everything as bodies were removed one at a time from the diner while he stepped around possible evidence. He had filled one roll of film, and was now starting another. At last count, Sara had fifty-three known bullet holes and twenty-two scattered .38 caliber shells and still had several more.

Katherine looked up as the body of Prue Pryde was carried out after being uncovered by her husband's corpse. Those two little girls outside had lost both their parents and her role as a mother wanted to hold them and tell them things would be okay. Grissom meanwhile stood transfixed by the blast marks in the diner. The blue walls had been marked with odd warped areas of scorched metal as if they had been blasted with lightning.

"I know one thing." Warrick announced standing up straight. "This entire diner doesn't have enough power to leave impressions like that."

"Could be lightning strikes from the outside in." Grissom tilted his head with a quirky little grimace. "Lightning causes ozone in the air by electrifying oxygen molecules."

"Gunshots to the electrical system could have sent short circuits up to the pole and caused discharges to hit the diner on the outside." Warrick theorized.

"But the burn patterns are inside suggesting in to out." Grissom challenged Warrick to think fourth-dimensionally. "What do we have in here that can create enough electricity on the level of a lightning bolt?"

"More pictures." Warrick turned and snapped a photo of the counter top covered with plates of abandoned dinners. Another camera clicking pictures of the exterior of the dinner hung around the neck of Sara Sidle marking bullet rounds with numbered tiles. Her head turned up from her work the Pryde girls being taken away by human resource officers. She was their age when she was taken from her parents. She hadn't seen her older brother, Matt, in years, and times like this made her wonder if he was still alive. Brass stepped into her line of vision as the girls were taken away in a white van.

"Father pushed his wife and children to the floor to try and save them." Brass hated this part. "Only the little girls survived." He shared the pain as a parent with Catherine Willows. Her hair was a bit mussed and her once clean jeans were now covered in traces of blood from the victims.

"Did you catch this?" She pointed to the dirt ground under the windows of the diner.

"Yeah," Sara snapped a second photo of the sneaker imprints in the loose dirt. "Nick just took prints. Someone walked from the scene. Hopefully a person who saw and can identify the shooters." Her head turned to the person sneaking up behind her from across the police line of reporters and the morbidly curious. Catherine turned her head up as well and recognized their lab tech standing out of place in their crime scene.

"What are you doing here?" Catherine noticed Greg Sanders standing by her about as obvious as a tourist in the Kremlin.

"It's my night off." Greg announced in shock at the murders. "I heard about the shoot out on the news and came to get a look. Did Ruby make it?"

Sara, Catherine and Brass slowly shook their lowered heads in unison.

"I loved her baked catfish!" Greg grieved the talent of a culinary maestro.

"You show up..." Grissom walked over and handed Greg a pad. "You go to work. Follow Warrick and take notes." Grissom then turned to Brass. "What are the witnesses saying?"

"Not much," Jim turned from the informal huddle of minds and flipped open his pad with a professional gesture. "Haven't had a chance to talk to the people who left by ambulance, but Ruby's niece, Patience, was washing dishes in back just before the murders. She testifies to three young punks harassing a motorcyclist just before the gunshots started. She dived under the counter and didn't come out until the shooting stopped, but get this, while she was hiding, she said she heard explosions."

"What kind of explosions?" Gil Grissom narrowed his eyes as he tried to decipher the way people described things. Sometimes loud pops were explosions or sometimes gunshots were crackling noises. Just what the niece heard was going to be a challenge to explain.

"Explosions." Brass added to the mystery with a wry look over witness credibility. "Like fireworks."

"Could be from the overhead lights exploding." Grissom theorized, but even he knew it wasn't likely.

"Now, a car did pull in trying to help after the fact." Brass flipped down to a third page of indecipherable witness testimonies he had written in haste. "A witness who stopped to help describes seeing a blue convertible mustang racing away…" Brass turned briefly to uniformed Officer Bruno Hess. "I've got all points for all cars matching that in the…"

"Captain," Hess looked up with Slavic features. "We do have a blue convertible mustang about five hundred feet up the highway. It ran off the road with three bodies in it; state police are about to…"

"Don't let them touch it!" Grissom stood up straight quick enough to realize this had to be the shooters and he didn't want another officer tainting a connecting crime scene. Brass felt that way as well. Grabbing his kit, Grissom was on his way without his team to secure the scene and evidence with brass leading the way. The scene was just as expected. Fifteen feet down an incline off the road, there was a mismatched blue convertible trashed in a gully. One figure was dead lengthwise across the back seat while the other two slumped forward in the front seat. Brass called the officers to stand aside as Grissom pulled on fresh gloves to avoid cross contamination and then analyzed the driver. First thing he saw was the fixed lividity of the driver as he sat slumped over the car laying lengthwise forward. That wasn't unusual considering they might have fled the diner in the last twenty minutes, but Grissom smelled something else. The tall driver with the curly red hair had burn marks in his clothing as if he'd been on fire but hadn't burned. Both his passengers had the same burn marks in their chests.

"These guys have been electrocuted." He spoke out loud for Brass to hear. Acknowledging that realization, the seasoned officer turned his head upward to the overhead electrical cables.

"Maybe God got to them before we did." He made a comment.

"Can you get him for questioning?" Grissom asked.

"Is that a challenge?"


	3. Chapter 3

PART THREE

Coroner Albert Robbins maneuvered through the darkened pathology lab as if he were an Arthurian wizard in his inner sanctum. His electrically powered sun shone on the skinny and white naked body of Kenny Groth on the diagnosis table for sacrificial analyzation to the gods of forensics. His chest crossed with stitches from his autopsy, Groth looked asleep while Robbins leaned over him tracing the lines of electrical current blasted through his nervous system. One line went down the young man's left leg while another followed the path of a carotid artery up the side of the head to the brain. A burst of light and Gil Grissom stepped through the doorway into the lab for an overview of the victims.

"Good eye on the electrocution…" Robbins looked up with his bearded Santa Claus features. "Each of the victims was hit with somewhere between two to five thousand volts of electricity. Groth looks like he was hit first…" Robbins now had names from their mug shots detained through fingerprints. "Thecurrent hit him straight to the chest and stopped his heart on impact. He was already dead by time he hit the ground."

"Well, drag marks at the diner show he was tossed into the back seat prior to the crash. His buddies must not known he was dead when they tossed him into the car." Grissom revealed. "What about the other two?"

"Identical COD." Robbins hobbled by cane on his good leg to the shelves holding the other victims. He opened the door on Frank Wise and pulled out the shelf with the tall, freckled and angular redhead laying on it. "Massive electrical current across the heart, but this time I think it was more or less indirect because the heart still struggled to beat before it quit at the point of death. Another thing I noticed, the amount of electricity that killed all three of them seems to have a bioelectric signature." He looked up wondering how Grissom would respond to that.

"Bioelectric…" Grissom removed his glasses. "But you said they were killed by up to five thousand volts of electricity. Bioelectric charges only register as high as a hundred amps."

"Well, the delayed rigor, lack of internal scorch marks and missing damage to the nervous system suggests they weren't hit by lightning or by any electrical discharge." Robbins started turning Wise's body over to show his back. "The amount of electricity sent through them passed through them instead of grounding itself."

"Sounds like lightning…" Grissom realized. "But it's not behaving like lightning. It's almost as if something was controlling it."

"Do you know anyone with a stun gun the size of a Buick?" Robbins suggested.

"Grissom," Nick stuck his head into the lab. "Got a minute?"

The CSI director and the pathologist shared another look on the body of Frank Wise and placed him back on to the shelf. Grissom replaced his glasses to his head and strided out to Nick in the hall with questions to the answers so far.

"Warrick and I finished processing the car." Nick hastened to keep up with him. "Forensics on the convertible show there was a fourth person in it. I checked files and discovered that one other person named Michael McKinnon usually rode with the other three. I've got Hodges running a search for his last known whereabouts."

"Good," Grissom slightly nodded his head. "Could be the person we have as leaving on foot from the murder scene." He started to march past the break room. Sara and Catherine were eating their late dinner and discussing the big case at hand and Warrick was looking for himself on the news. Local KTSP field reporter Shelly Jamison was at the site of the diner broadcasting the developing news on the murders taped earlier that night in front of a crowd of by-standers, the morbidly curious and the male fans obsessed with the tight sweaters of the attractive, blonde new reporter.

"Beloved diner matron, Ruby Hollander was struck down at the age of 72…" Jamison continued. "For fifty-seven years, her diner has been one of the most talked about eateries in the Greater Las Vegas area, but now the diner is gone. Her windows boarded up, the diner sealed and police tape across the parking lot and structure, the much-loved restraunt is gone – taken from us by an act of violence so heinous that human decency almost forbids me from going into details. The police have yet to go into details, but…"

"Wait a minute," Grissom reacted seeing something in the news footage that caught his attention. "Warrick, play that back…"

"What?" The handsome African heartthrob slowly reacted with the same distracted demeanor that kept him from making a supervisor status and rewound the computer-generated replay on the TIVO. "Did you catch something? What'd you see?"

"Freeze it there." Grissom hit the freeze frame button himself then looked up again. "Now, look at those faces, and tell me who doesn't belong. " He glanced at Catherine then to Sara and expected them to catch what he saw. Sara glanced to Warrick a moment and Catherine perused the faces of the myriad on-lookers and morbidly curious witnesses and then perused them again. Nothing really unusual, it was human condition to be fascinated by lethal tragedies. It was some curiosity factor that made the living want to learn from the errors of the dead and it had probably being going on for hundreds of years. In the crowd, Catherine slowly gasped at a busty beauty with long dark hair in a red dress.

"That's Tammy Felton!" She recalled the female psychopath. The girl had been kidnapped, raised by her abductor, the murderer of her foster father, and was a criminal mastermind all before the age of twenty-five. She had even deceived and absconded on her trusting birth parents. "That's impossible!"

"Isn't she supposed to be dead?" Sara shook her head trying to deny what her eyes were seeing.

"Maybe she needs to be reminded…" Catherine recalled the little psycho very well.


	4. Chapter 4

PART FOUR

Nick Stokes turned his brown eyes up to the floor plans of the diner posted on the board. The lay out was quite simple. The Mason Jar Restraunt really had once been a train dining car at one time in its existence. In fact, it was once called the Box Car Restraunt, but it was Ruby and Jack Hollander that had made the place work. Eight booths lined the side of the restraunt down the left from the entrance while four lined the left side up to the counter area and five stools at the counter. The kitchen had been an add on afterward in order to keep from squeezing a limited amount of eating patrons to a limited number of tables, but the wait had been more than enough for a taste of Ruby's broccoli casserole or her German chocolate cake. Realizing he'd never taste Ruby's exquisite seafood salad or her mouth-watering tuna salad sandwiches, Nick used the schematic of the diner to trace the paths and velocities of the spray of bullets in the lost landmark. Red lines came from Kenny Groth and came left to right toward the kitchen while Frank Wise had fired the blue lines right to left and took out the customers scrambling for their lives. Joey Vasquez must have taken out Jerome Howard trying to get out behind him. Based on the groove patterns of each gun, it was becoming obvious who had shot whom.

"Very good job, Nick." Grissom applauded his excellent work.

"Well, Warrick got me started." Nick looked up briefly. "It was a group effort. Now, Groth obviously shot first going by the witness testimonies. They were firing a spray pattern as if they were shooting ducks at the carnival with shots going everywhere and ricocheting into the wall behind them."

"Bullets don't ricochet off aluminum walls." Grissom was quick to point out.

"You see my problem." Nick beamed like a little kid with a secret and turned with a juvenile step to the electron microscope. "Check out the bullet fragment." He continued talking as Grissom lifted his glasses and looked down through the microscope upon a fragment of bullet with fabric on it. "What you're looking at it a partial of calfskin leather, and not just any calfskin leather, but very old calfskin leather. It hasn't been processed like that in over fifty years."

"Leather isn't processed from calfskin very often either." Grissom restored his glasses and folded his arms as his mind subconsciously processed the data. "Looks like one of our victims was almost killed in an antique jacket."

"Almost killed is right," Nick folded his arms before him briefly. "But Groth was firing with copper-tipped bullets. These suckers do a lot of damage, and the damage on the bullet is consistent with somewhere wearing a flak jacket at thirty feet."

"Sounds like someone was expecting to be shot." Grissom couldn't believe how the evidence was turning. This new evidence was taking the murder scene into another direction. "All these ricochet shots are on an area of two feet in the aisle. Do you have a name to this person?'

"I was afraid you'd ask that." Nick turned to the board again. "I've cross-checked the victims with their locations, shooters and blood types." He made references to the gruesome crime scene photos used to determine placement of victims on the victim placement map. "Jerome Howard, tourist, 43, left of entrance…" He listed the eleven deaths.

"William and Prue Pryde, parents, 34 and 33, third booth left side…" Nick referred one by one to the photos of the victims. They had been shot in the head, neck and upper body.

"Truck drivers, Chad Kandros and Derek Brown, 28 and 31, fifth booth left side…" They were shot in the head and chest.

"Joyce Sandsmark, schoolteacher, 43, seventh booth left side…." She had been shot twice in the chest.

"Laurence Morris, salesman, 51, first booth right side…." He was shot in the head.

"Richard Lyle, dishwasher, 18…" He was also shot in the head.

"Jack and Ruby Hollander, owners, 75 and 72…." Multiple gunshots….

"Charity Hollander, 17, waitress…." She was shot in the back as she raced for the back door.

"Eleven bodies, all identified," Nick showed the results of his hard work. "No one was wearing a leather jacket over a flak jacket."

"We're missing a body." Grissom and Stokes shared a look over this puzzle. They hated missing pieces - especially ones that could walk away from murder scenes. Ever inquisitive, the fourth-dimensional reasoning skills of Gil Grissom starting marching with his deductive intuition, and his eyes starting darting back and forth with the photo and crime scene chart. He glanced from photo to the chart, to the angle of bullets and then back to the ricochet point the bullets were deflecting from in the diner. In his mind, he was standing in that spot like a Kryptonian comic book hero watching the murder scene happen as an illusion around him, but instead of looking at his shooters, he looked to the counter and noticed something in the photos.

"You based this from the layout of the bodies." Grissom realized.

"Yeah…" Nick confessed.

"How about from the dinner settings?" Grissom pointed to the photo of the second counter seat from the door. It had a place setting of silverware and an abandoned menu. "Who was sitting here?"

"No one…" Nick answered then rethought his answer. "No one who suffered a gun shot and died as a result." He realized his error in thinking. "I'll head back to the scene. Maybe I can still get prints off the menu or silverware."

Catherine Willows and Sara Sidle meanwhile headed side by side to the Golden Nugget Restraunt, but they weren't interested in the food there. The family style restraunt on Audrey Street was known in this world for steaks, seafood dinners and Italian-style spaghetti dinners and in the next world for being the location of an old slave cemetery. Since 1953, over seventy employees and customers had reported everything from voices at night, shadowy figures sitting at tables and water faucets that turned on by themselves. None of the current employees believed the stories, but every so often a door opened by itself or the security system registered someone inside after closing. All the waitresses wore red uniforms with blue aprons like the young lady in Catherine's photo. Strolling in past happily fed patrons, the two lady criminologists smelled first the aromatic odor of steaks tinged with spaghetti sauce and then noticed the western-style décor of the interior. Sara felt herself gaining five pounds from just looking at the food around her.

"Yes, do you have a reservation?" Lisa Uber, a pretty brunette waitress, turned to seat them.

"No, we don't." Catherine led the investigation as Sara felt herself fifteen pounds heavier from all this food around her. "We're from the crime lab. We're trying to identify this young lady." She held up the photo from the news broadcast the previous night. Lisa looked over the image of people and recognized the waitress uniform on the busty brunette in the picture as one of her co-workers.

"Yes, that's Monica Uchtman." Lisa answered. "She works the night shift."

"When does she get in?" Sara asked coldly professional.

"She's in back right now waiting to clock in." Lisa answered without anything to hide. "Is she in any sort of trouble?"

"We're just talking to her." Catherine answered, but she really meant she didn't know yet. Sitting in the back dining room reserved for parties, she and Sara could talk to this Tammy Felton doppelganger in private without the risk of causing a scene. Just seeing Monica in person almost had Catherine wanting to pull her gun. She had seen Tammy dead in a car trunk with a gunshot through her chest and in the pathology lab; seeing her alive in the form of this friendly and exuberant waitress was more than she could take.

"Hello," The busty brunette beauty reacted quite unlike the late Tammy Felton. She seemed to have a sparking vivacious personality and open, friendly demeanor. Dressed in her red waitress uniform with her blue apron and smock combination, she looked as if she had stepped out of a television carton series for adults. "I'm Monica, Lisa said you wanted to see me. Am I in any trouble?"

"Is it Uck-man or Ucht-man?" Sara asked for the right pronunciation.

"Uck-man." Monica answered.

"Mrs. Uchtman," Catherine turned forward a computer-printed screen capture from the news broadcast. "Is this you?"

"Oh my god," Monica lightly beamed. "My grandmother said I was on TV. You see, I live with her on Canyon Road and I pass by the diner every day. I went to school with Patience and Charity Hollander and they often give me a discount on dinner there." She paused respectfully to recall both of them then looked up afraid. "You don't think I had anything to do with their murders, do you?"

"Actually, only Charity was murdered in the shoot out." Catherine reported freely. "Patience survived, but she's still in a state of shock." She paused as Monica gave a brief of relief for small favors and shed a tear for lost friends taken cruelly from her.

"Miss Uchtman," Sara pulled out another picture, but this one was a black and white portrait with numbers. "Have you ever seen this person before?" She turned the picture round for Monica to see it. As her eyes reflected the picture to her mind, the young woman reacted confused and upset. It was her and it looked as if she had a criminal record. She didn't have a memory of having a picture like this taken of her. She might not have lead a stellar life, but she had never been arrested or picked up by the police.

"What is this?" She reacted with fear that she was being framed for Charity's murder. "How did you get this? What kind of cruel joke are you trying to pull here!"

"It's not a joke, Miss Uchtman." Catherine lightly tossed her hair out of her eyes. "Actually the girl in that picture is one Melissa Marlowe, but she actually went by the name Tammy Felton. She had been kidnapped from her biological parents and raised by her abductor who she later murdered. Last year, she was found dead after holding up a casino on the Strip."

"We'd just like to confirm your identity to be sure." Sara spoke up taking out a fingerprinting kit. "With your permission, we'd like to take your fingerprints to compare against Miss Felton's." Sara paused. "It's strictly voluntary, of course."

"But I'm not being arrested?" Monica asked.

"Only if you've done something to be arrested for." Catherine replied as Monica held her hands out to prove she wasn't this female psychopath. In a routine she had done several times, Sara took the young lady's fingers one at a time and starting putting them in dye and making prints from her girl's fingers.

"Please tell me this washes off!" Monica griped out loud over this humiliating circumstance. She then leaned back in her seat at the sight of the next thing the criminologists pulled out on her.

"What's that?"

"We want some DNA." Catherine announced as discreetly as possible.


	5. Chapter 5

PART FIVE

"Lindsay," Catherine Willows tried to outwit her daughter from afar. "If your grandmother thinks you should wear a sweater to the movies, don't be calling me to try and over rule her. I'm on her side. Just wear the sweater, case closed." She rolled her eyes, clicked off her cell phone, shook her head trying figure out teenage girls and then briefly recalled when it was her arguing with her mother to try and remain acceptable by the narrow definition of being cool with her old friends. Those days sometimes seemed as if they were just yesterday to her. Sighing loudly, she paused at the trials of being a single mother and looked up briefly to Janice Hester, the pretty young blonde who handled the phone calls pouring into the police station. Catherine had just briefly turned away as Janice called her back.

"Mrs. Willows…" Janice's head barely poked over the top of her contained cubicle. "There's a Mrs. Marlowe on the phone. She's asking to talk to you."

"Marlowe?" Catherine took a moment trying to recall someone with that name and then somehow flashed back on Tammy Felton's biological parents. If Grissom could catch Monica in that that news broadcast about the murders at the diner, surely the Marlowe's could catch the same thing in any of the repeated broadcasts about the murder investigation. Gritting her teeth briefly, wondering what she was going to say and looking to Janice for mental support, Catherine nervously took the phone and wondered what she was going to say to a bereaved mother she herself had had the unpleasant task of formerly telling of the murder of her own daughter.

"Hello?" Catherine tensed up a bit.

"Mrs. Willows," It was the mother's voice. "This is Victoria Marlowe, Melissa's mother. I don't know if you remember me, but…"

"I recall you Mrs. Marlowe." Catherine rolled her eyes little anticipating what she predicted the bereaved mother was calling about. "How can I help you?"

"Johnathan and I were watching the news this morning and we saw…." The distraught mother revealed. "Well, we saw Melissa! She was at the site of the Mason Jar! You told us she was dead. How is this possible? Are you sure we buried our daughter?"

"Mrs. Marlowe," Catherine treaded lightly into this discussion trying to decide what she was going to say. "Right now, I can assure you that the team is covering every aspect of that case and have spoken to all the witnesses…"

"But Melissa! We saw her!"

"Mrs. Marlowe…" Catherine wished she could tell them it was her daughter, but she also had a responsibility to protect Monica's privacy. "The young lady you are speaking of is not your daughter. We already checked her out, and she is definitely not Tammy, er, I mean, your daughter, Melissa. We're positive of it."

"I know my daughter." Victoria Marlowe paced her home feeling pangs of a daughter she never knew and wanted back. "It has to be her. Can you be so positive?"

"Her fingerprints and DNA is not a match to your daughter. She's may look like Melissa, but she's not her." Catherine spoke with the bitter taste of the truth on her lips. She wished she could lie because she knew how the death of Melissa was still ripping apart the Marlowe's. When Tammy was found dead in that car trunk, they may have been reimbursed the bail they had spent to let her out of prison, but it was not much solace for a two grieving parents who had known she was still alive and had to find her again in the form of that little psycho named Tammy Felton. A sound of anguish came from the phone as Catherine listened. The truth was often a bitter pill and reality a cold sobering experience. Mrs. Marlowe just hung up the phone refusing to accept the death of her daughter and left Catherine Willows feeling the role of a harbinger of bad news.

Still sitting on the counter was the Monica Uchtman file. Waiting to be filed, Catherine perused it briefly once more. Born in Los Angeles in 1979, the busty brunette turned out to not have a stellar reputation herself. Monica Dawn Uchtman had once been arrested for horseback riding in the nude and for breaking into a boyfriend's house and trashing it; it was quite tame stuff compared to the murders left in Tammy's wake. Wanting to find something to connect Monica to Melissa, Catherine perused an arrest report from when the young beauty was a teenage wild child picked up for drinking and driving and then looked up to Gil Grissom wandering into her direction. A file concerning a body covered in cockroaches within a tenement held his interest, but before Catherine could get his attention, Nick Stokes rushed excitedly toward the both of them.

"Grissom," He had another file. "I got our unknown witness out of the diner. Ares Marshall, a soldier-for-hire out of Sparta, Texas. I lifted his prints off the menu and sent his prints to trace. Brass just sent a warrant on him."

"Soldier of fortune?" Grissom repeated Nick as if he didn't hear him the first time. In his hands, he had a copy of Marshall's FBI file for causing trouble in Third War Nations for selling weapons, inciting violence and stirring up trouble in Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Korea. Wondering how a figure like this could be running around loose and traveling the United States uncontrolled, he looked closely at the ragged dark-haired figure with the goatee photo then noticed the list of aliases. Among the names was one for Marshall Reason. Reason? Wasn't that the name for that family named after figures from Greek myth from the Jason Troy case? Marshall certainly had the record for a modern god of war. Grissom smirked a bit wondering just how far this odd scenario was going to continue to turn out.

"What?" Nick noticed the smirk.

"It's going to be interesting to get him in here." Grissom looked forward to meeting someone else in excess of a thousand years old then turned to Catherine.

"I just had a very heart-rending phone call." She gasped first and then continued. "I was just confronted by the biological mother of Tammy Felton wanting to know if we had made an error in identifying her daughter's body."

"She must have seen the news broadcast." Nick realized.

"Exactly," Catherine shifted nervously in her shoes. "I was thinking about paying Monica a visit and letting her know about it."

"Why?" Grissom responded matter-of-factly. "You don't think the Marlowes will trace down Monica, do you?"

"We did." Nick added.

"If we can recognize Monica's waitress uniform, certainly the Marlowes could. They never accepted losing their daughter after finding her again." Catherine played the role of a parent on their side, but she was also tempered by the boundaries of her job. "I just think I should have told Monica that…"

"Why don't you just wait and see what happens?" Gill advised her. "No sense getting Monica stirred up over nothing."

"You just want to stand back and see what develops." Nick figured out how Grissom was thinking. He and Catherine looked back to him with stunned reverence realizing just how he became fascinated by human behavior.

"If it happens, it happens…" Grissom tilted his head to the side.

Eventually it became the lateness of the dinner hour and Victoria Marlowe was trying to play the role of detective. The dress and style of the woman in the news broadcast she believed was her daughter certainly resembled the uniforms of the waitresses in photos for the Golden Nugget Restraunt fliers in the newspaper. Not quite so interested in the food but more for her piece of mind, she entered the cuisine-flavored aroma filled restraunt off the Las Vegas strip and found herself alone in a crowd of a hundred people. All the waitresses had that red dress and blue apron and smock combination. There were quite a few of the young ladies with brunette hair and even a token blonde. Looking out over the full dining room of restraunt patrons, she looked beyond the cash register with paying customers and over toward young men frying steaks and flipping pork chops. From out of nowhere, Monica Uchtman stood up from carrying dishes out and laughed with her fellow employees. Victoria's heart went out to her. This was the person her daughter was: jovial, friendly and out-going with a love for life and a rosy disposition for people around her. She was nothing like that cold, manipulative girl she had met. Moving to the register and picking up her pad, Monica stood up smiling before Mrs. Marlowe and welcomed her with a bright smile.

"Hello," She beamed ear-to-ear and stood proudly and eagerly to help. "Welcome to the Golden Nugget. Is this a party of one?"

"Melissa?" Mrs. Marlowe asked with her voice contained at almost a whisper. Her feelings and hope then took over and she stepped forward and hugged this young woman. This was her daughter; she knew it. Her heart told her so. She had finally found her!

Monica meanwhile just stood where she was and realized what was happening. Who was this woman and why was she hugging her? She looked to Lisa at the register for answers, but Lisa just grinned at her and left her to decide what to do next. Blinking her eyes a few times, Monica just sighed a bit and then patted this woman on the back to comfort her back.


	6. Chapter 6

PART SIX

"Grissom," Nick was sounding exuberant as if he had a theory to the twins separated by birth case. "I was thinking about this whole Monica Uchtman thing. Remember Paul Millander? He suggested is that everyone has a twin. I mean, there has to be a finite number of genetic markers in the world and perhaps every so often the same combination occurs and two unrelated people do look alike."

"I don't think so." Grissom didn't think like that. "Millander, much like The Patty Duke Show, was wrong." "Cousins can never look alike, much less complete strangers; it's a myth."

" I hope so…" Warrick started to force a grin with his little banter. "I know I can sleep easier at night knowing there's only one Nick in the world."

"Aw, come on…"

"Warrick," Grissom flashed a new case file. "Disappearance of a teenager down on Caldwell. I want you on it. Take Nick with you."

"Right…." Warrick and Nick shared a look like two brothers who liked punching each other's buttons. Looking at them and trying to decide if they were colleagues or proverbial younger brothers, he turned a corner and saw Jim Brass standing very proud of himself. He was grinning ear to ear like a young kid.

"We got him."

"McKinnon?" Grissom immediately thought of the fourth possible shooter.

"Ares Marshall." Brass revealed. "The FBI just delivered him for us from Nashville, Tennessee where he was visiting his sister. She practically turned him over to us."

"You mean Marshall Reason." Grissom answered as Brass failed to follow. "I've got a sneaky hunch he's related to J. Peter Reason."

"The philanthropist with the Greek myth fixation." Brass recalled the case with Jason Scott Troy. "You're right on track, his sister is Minerva Reason, a professor of historical antiquities at the University of Tennessee. She talked him into turning himself over to the FBI."

"Well, she was the goddess of wisdom." Grissom played this game out to as far as it seemed to reach.

"She must really love country music then to live in Nashville." Brass mumbled a bit amused at the things people named their children.

"No," Grissom shook his head. "There's a replica of the Parthenon in Nashville. It was her temple." They turned together into the conference room. Marshall Reason, sometimes Ares Marshall, sat at the table accompanied by two FBI agents. Clad in leather, blue jeans and a black t-shirt, he sat with his leather boots disrespectfully perched upon the table and a thick mane of long dark uncombed hair surrounding his unkempt appearance. Grissom looked at him and realized he certainly fit the image of a modernized war god living within the restrains of the twenty-first century no longer adored by followers or worshippers. An irreverent glance from the would-be mercenary followed Grissom and Brass as they took seats and forgot the insinuations of this figure possibly being the same figure who once ordered ancient Greek armies and fought with his brothers for the attention of their father.

"We'll be outside the room." The government agents excused themselves.

"What? No tip?" Reason disrespectfully called to them then shrugged his shoulders.

"Take your feet off the table." Brass spoke next. "This isn't a barn."

"Well, some famous prophets were born in barns." Reason sighed a bit bored and moved his feet before sitting up straight and leaning back in his seat. He reacted bored and with contempt knowing he could leave this place at any minute and they couldn't stop him.

"You're probably wondering why you're here…"

"Well, the thought did cross my mind." Reason answered with a sort of whimsical discarded interest.

"We were able to connect you to murders at the Mason Jar Restraunt on the Interstate." Brass continued. "Now, we know you didn't have a part in the murders, but…" Brass grinned with a chuckle as he scratched his ear. "You fled the scene without getting injury. How did you manage not getting shot?"

"Flak jacket." Reason answered as if he were telling Brass what he wanted to hear. "I've been shot at before." He turned his head to Grissom silently studying him. "Go ahead and ask what you're thinking. You've already guessed the truth about my family, but you don't want to believe it. You still want to think it's impossible, but guess what? You're not the first to figure it out."

"That you're Ares, the god of war." Grissom refused to slip into this game. Obviously the Reason family was incredibly set up like the gods of myth. J. P. Reason was almost the modern incarnation of Zeus posing as a mortal businessman. Apollo was posing as a mortal singer and Athena was a college professor while Helen of Troy was living the life of an actress and model. It all seemed incredibly far-fetched and all too impossible, but he had seen other incredible things. Cult leaders posed as gods in this world, but true immortals concealing their longevities and pasts behind mortal facades? It was a fascinating concept to tinker with, but in the end, he knew he'd find the answer.

"I don't care if you want us to believe you're Jesus Christ himself." Brass added to the would-be war god. "But eleven people are dead in my morgue and someone walked away from the scene. You want to tell us what happened and how you escaped without a scratch."

"It's not against the law to run from children playing with guns." Reason mouthed off. "Have you found Michael McKinnon yet?"

"The fourth shooter?" Grissom asked.

"He never fired a gun." Reason leaned back in his seat. "He never even entered the diner…. Oh crap…" He looked up to window to the hall and recognized the figure in the blue Armani suit in the hall talking to the FBI agents. It was his father, J. Peter Reason, himself. Philanthropist and contributor to the arts, the bearded patriarch was on first name terms with figures in the FBI, the American Government and British and Greek embassies. Part playboy, part financier, the Reason family head pushed into the conference room with the demeanor of an irate father pressed by the activities of his grown children.

"I'm in the middle of a business venture in Cairo with Amun Ra and Nyambe Orishas of Nigeria and I get a message from your sister that you've blown up a diner in Las Vegas; just what goes through your mind?" He resumed a long tirade of arguments with a son who seemed to be at the bane of his existence.

"Don't make me leave with this man." The younger Reason bemoaned. "I'll confess to anything! Just don't make me leave with him!"

"Excuse me," Grissom spoke up to this father-son dispute. "He didn't blow it up. We found no evidence of explosives on the site."

"You want evidence of explosives?" Reason looked down to his son. "Give me a few minutes alone with him."

"If you're up there…." Marshall Reason looked up through the ceiling and proved that even retired Olympian deities believed in a one true God. "Take me now!"

Nick Stokes and Warrick Brown soon found themselves elsewhere. Caldwell was a suburban street east of town with two story homes and swimming pools. It was the kind of neighborhood meant for the almost rich, the type of folks like doctors, lawyers and real estate developers. Nick wore his sunglasses in the car to read the initial report and then looked out to the Danvers house that served as the waiting crime scene. Officer Bruno Hess was on site to take a report from Charlotte Danvers, the mother of missing young man. The absent youth was William Danvers, thirteen years old, and he'd been home sick from school. His mother had just left him alone to go to work and bring home some medicine. Her son had stopped answered the phone after lunchtime and she had hoped he was just asleep, but when she got home and realized he was gone, she became worried. It was so unlike him to leave the house when he was sick.

"Where's your son's room, Mrs. Danvers?" Nick had done the initial breakthrough.

"Upstairs," She answered held back by Officer Hess. Her eyes were filled with tears of worry. Warrick started up first carrying his test case and looked to the room. Posters bikini-clad and leotard-covered women stared down from the blue walls. The desk by the door was relatively undisturbed but for a stack of school textbooks. Light from the window came through a large fish tank. Nick first checked the floor for footsteps and Warrick pulled down the bed sheets of the unmade bed.

"What is that!" Warrick was unprepared for what he found. Nick clicked a few more pictures of patterns in the carpet and looked up to the bed. Across the single bed in the vague shape of a human figure was a strange mucous residue reaching under the sheets. Specks of it were on the blankets and sheets, but most of it was in the head impression on the pillow or in the shape of the body on the mattress.

"Looks as if he blew his nose on the fitted sheet, but…" Nick contorted his face disgustedly. "But that is a lot of mucus even if you are sick from school." He looked over the length of it. "I'd say about five and a half feet long and one and a half feet at its widest point." He started snapping pictures of the crime scene.

"It's as if he melted." Warrick placed some chemicals on the tip of a cotton swab and then took a sample of the residue. If the substance were human, the chemical would turn red from the presence of DNA. He held up his test and watched as the residue produced an orange, not quite red, reaction. Warrick made a face as if he was not prepared for this one.

"I don't think we have a normal disappearance here." He replied.


	7. Chapter 7

PART SEVEN

Greg Sanders preferred working in the field to being in the lab. He didn't hate the lab, but he was started to feel constrained by its limits. He'd had a taste of field work after the massive bus crash and while using his knowledge of coin-collecting to catch a killer and now he was hoping for a replacement to take his place once he earned the right to go on cases instead of sitting on the sideline and watching cases float through and past his limited scope of the evidence. He wanted the experience of being smart and the thrill of catching criminals. He didn't want to be famous; he didn't have the ego for that, but a little notoriety would have been nice.

"Greg," Warrick wandered into the room eager for the results on his case. "Please tell me you got my stuff."

"You make me sound like a drug dealer." Greg took offense.

"I do?" Warrick chuckled at him. "Just give me the stuff; what is it?"

"Ask me what it isn't?" Greg lifted his analysis of the residue. "Pure blood plasma, human sweat, liquid bone marrow, bone calcium, seminal fluids, lymphatic tissue, human enzymes, synaptic fluid and a whole host of other goodies that makes us what we are."

"My god," Warrick read it himself. "He really did melt…." He looked to Greg again. "Can you prove it's all from William Danvers?"

"Can't." Greg answered. "The cells are in lysis; there's no genetic material to test." He paused, thought a second and wondered out loud. "Uh, if he did somehow melt, where's the other hundred pounds of him?"

"Good question." Warrick asked. "What about prints?"

"Mother, son and one partial." Greg clicked computer on to the CODIS site for matching fingerprints. "No matches, but then there wasn't enough to match. The owner of those prints burned their prints off."

"Great…." Warrick marched out with the test result and caught Gil Grissom in a darkened office by a solitary light reading a book about World Mythology. Ares Marshall Reason had been released to his own recognizance and the FBI had reminded him that he was still under observation. It was almost as if they wanted to contain him, but knew they'd never be able to keep him under wraps. The whole conspiracy with the FBI and the Reason family possibly being who or what they seemed to be plied Grissom's mind over and over. According to the book, Amun Ra was the Chieftain of the Egyptian Gods and Nyambe was ruler of the Orishas, the spirits still worshipped by the tribes of Africa. If they still existed with the Olympians, just how much further did the scope of this immortal lineage reach? Looking up from his section about animistic gods and figures that revered insects, the celebrated bug man looked up while Warrick stood over him ready to challenge his fourth dimensional thinking.

"Grissom, read that and tell me what you think." He sailed the file over as Grissom caught it under his right hand and adjusted his glasses. After a few seconds, Grissom looked up with concern.

"This is human sludge." He answered.

"What would do that?"

"Well, being churned in a giant blender or being dead for a long time in an air-tight compacted space." Grissom reflected on known cases and scientific data. "The human body is mostly water and it tends to turn to liquid when the moisture can't escape. Is this from the Danvers case?"

"This kid was left at home for less than ten hours and his mother found that in his bed on her return." Warrick hated cases that took the lives of kids. They often hit him personally. "I checked the mother's alibi and she was at work for the entire day except a trip to the drugstore on the way home and the druggist recalls her there. This is not a murder or a case of neglect. That kid seems to have melted into less than ten percent of his body weight. I'd hate to think where the rest of him is. Now, there was evidence of a possible third person, but those could be left over from a best friend or… "

"Head back to the house." Grissom suggested. "Check it inside and out. Maybe you and Nick missed something."

"I'm on it." Warrick turned back the way he had come. As he crossed the conference room, he noticed Brass and Willows talking to Michael McKinnon. The punk had been caught loitering in the basement of the old abandoned Clark County Methodist Church. He was known for frequenting with both Kenny Groth and Joey Vasquez and his prints had been in their car. His shoe prints also proved he had been at the diner watching the shooting from outside.

"You and your idiot buddies have made being difficult a hobby." Brass did not hide hating this punk. "Speeding, felony evading, shop-lifting, burglary, theft, assault and battery, vandalism… but you've never killed anyone before." He reacted superficially to McKinnon's presence. "Where did you guys get guns?"

"Kenny's brother left them behind in a closet." McKinnon answered finally realizing the mistakes that brought him here, but he also seemed scared straight and wanted to explain why. "Joey wanted to get even with Sadler and Kendall for shooting our ride."

"You're too late." Catherine lifted her head. "Someone else got them a few days ago. " She watched as McKinnon reacted unexpectedly to the news.

"You want to tell us what happened at the diner?" Brass lifted his head up. "And be careful what you say, because I'll know if you're lying."

"Joey had a chip on his shoulder with Sadler…" McKinnon started with his voice straining. "He'd worked himself into making a hit, and this guy on the cycle really ticked him off. He had to get him and we followed him up the road to the diner…" McKinnon flashed back upon that night. It was as if it had just happened. The power of fear, the taste of blood spraying and the fear of what they had unleashed. He had never lived through anything so close to a war before and he didn't want to relive it. Joey wanted to kill something that night; he wanted to take something out of his life that annoyed him and he didn't care if it was a person. That motorcyclist was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"Hey, is that your hog out there?" It was a few days earlier and Joey Vasquez sneered with disrespect to the cyclist. "You cut me off at the crossroads."

"You should have stopped at the sign." The motorcyclist now known as Ares Marshall Reason answered.

"You telling me how to drive?" Vasquez was backed by Kenny Groth and Frank Wright, two other high school dropouts under the deluded notion that a high school education was a waste of time and fear and intimidation was all they needed. Behind them, McKinnon stood stealing French fries from one of the customers.

"Hey," Jack Hollander called through the order window at the pieces of human trash. "I don't want you punks harassing my customers."

"Shut up old man or else I ventilate your stupid freaking diner!" Vasquez shot a look of human disrespect and turned back to his new source of hated. "How bout it, biker-man? You got what it takes?"

"I'm giving you one chance to walk way." The biker sipped his soda as Ruby waited fearfully to give the man his sizable dinner. "You don't want to go there. How about you do something smart for a change because if you mess with me, you won't see another day."

That was the wrong thing to say in a volatile situation with a teenage youth wanting to die in a blaze of glory. Striking the glass of soda from the man's hand, Vasquez reached to his back as Groth pulled out his choice of a problem-solver in the form of an automatic .38 revolver. Prue Pryde hit the floor under her table as her husband shielded her and their kids. Howard tried to bolt for the door and one of the truckers backed by his peers rushed for the teenage gangster wanna-be. Joey fired face first into the biker's fast and he flung backward fast to the floor and Ruby Hollander dropped a plate to start screaming at the person being killed before her. There were a lot of witnesses to what had happened and after killing one person, Joseph Geraldo Vasquez did not think against killing one more. How bout two more? First, he shot Ruby to stop her from screaming and Kenny Groth opened fire as well to plug the biker one more time, but his gun went off too early and hit the trucker with a spray of blood. Frank Wright shot Jerome Howard thinking he was being attacked. Not even looking at where he was fired, Vasquez closed his eyes and continued pressing the trigger until his chamber was empty. When he partially opened his eyes, the figure unknowingly named Marshall Reason had lifted up off the floor amidst the spray of bullets, broken glass and electricity crackling from the destroyed lights and stood pulling on his jacket against the bullets embedding themselves against his impervious flesh.

"Why don't you idiots ever listen!" He roared losing his temper. "And I was really feeling good about myself!" He pulled his arm back and hurled a volley of electrical bolts and then another volley from his left hand as if he were hurling weapons. Vasquez was struck by the lightening first and flew backward hard between Wright and Groth and knocked McKinnon out of the way. Still refusing to deny what they were seeing, Wright and Groth started firing on Reason, but the shots didn't even faze him. Standing impervious to bullets bouncing off his body and passing through the aluminum shell of the diner, Reason fired with electro-static bursts in the form of lightning bolts firing from his fingertips. Watching from the safety outside the diner, McKinnon watched as Groth sailed backward fast and hit the concrete parking lot first. Another burst of electrical light crackling in the diner and Wright smacked into the wall above the entrance before falling to the floor and landing face first out to the exterior steps. Kenny had had enough. Shooting innocents was one thing, but he was not going to be fried by a bulletproof superman firing lightning bolts from his fingers. Firing his few last shots into the diner, Reason took out the last flickering light and the motorcycle by the entrance. His shot took out its gas tank and sprayed gasoline over the ground. With Frank dragging Joey into their car, Frank stumbled to the driver's seat and started the vehicle with his hands shaking. Watching his buddies leave without him, McKinnon was now left behind and he only heard plaintive crying from someone hiding inside. Also surveying the damage, Reason looked around the ruined interior, the dead bodies and multiple bullet holes and groaned upset and distraught.

"The old man is really going to have a conniption about this!" He told himself. He started for his cycle, saw the gas tank blown open from the hail of bullets and sneered his lip back. "I loved this thing too." He whined over material possessions and sighed out loud. As McKinnon watched, there was another burst of light, and Reason vanished inside it as if he wasn't bound by the rules of this world and just possibly belonged to another. McKinnon just watched the vision of his disappearance, heard the plaintive cries of wounded survivors inside the diner and then tore away from the site in his size eleven sneakers.

It was now a few days later again and Catherine Willows and Jim Brass just stared at McKinnon over his story. Even the attending officer chuckled out loud at the crazy story. Behind the mirror, Sara Sidle just mumbled to herself.

"You have got to be kidding." She silently asked herself. Brass meanwhile looked up at McKinnon while Catherine dropped her jaw looking for something to say.

"Were you on anything during the shoot out?" She asked.

"I knew you'd ask that." McKinnon dropped his head and pulled his fingers through his sandy blonde hair. "I wasn't high. Joey wanted us clean when we took out Sadler! It really happened."

"Really?" Brass looked to Catherine with a bemused grin then back toward the wayward youth. "Make me believe it."


	8. Chapter 8

PART EIGHT

"We can't hold him." Brass told Grissom and looked back into the conference room as another detective tried to shake McKinnon's story. "He never fired a weapon, and there's no indication that he was in the diner except as a witness to what we already know. The district attorney's office says the shooters are dead and we should drop the case and move on."

"What do you think happened?" Grissom peered through the two-window at McKinnon.

"Well," Brass scratched his ear and mugged a bit disappointed. "I'd say Vasquez and buddies did shoot out the diner and were electrocuted after riddling the electrical system with bullets. McKinnon may actually believe he saw what he saw, but I'm not ready to believe that Marshall Reason was once Ares, god of war to the Ancient Greeks."

"I'm not ready to believe it either." Grissom mugged a bit himself. "The evidence tells us what it has to tell us. What we choose to believe is arbitrary."

"Mrs. Willows?" Monica Uchtman appeared in another part of the CSI building. With her appearance, Warrick Brown found himself checking her out and Nick Stokes thought he was looking at a ghost. Catherine looked to them and then back toward the good clone of the late Tammy Felton.

"Mrs. Uchtman." Catherine hoped she was pronouncing the young woman's name right. "Can I help you?"

"I encountered Melissa's mother yesterday." The young beauty confessed.

"That must have been interesting." Nick mumbled to Warrick.

"It was." Monica continued. "We got to talking and she told me about Melissa and then…." She lightly swayed her head trying to explain her thoughts. "You see, my mother died when I was little and she lost her daughter because of an abduction. She knows I'm not her real daughter, but she's so willing to be the mother I never had. Am I letting her do the right thing? I feel like I'm doing something wrong. Is this right?"

"I think it's the best thing for both of you." Catherine answered liking the way this was turning out. "There's nothing wrong with that."

"Then…." Melissa searched her feelings again. "Why does it feel so weird?"

"Maybe because you've never had a mother before." Grissom had slipped up silently to meet this young lady and see her for himself. He looked upon Monica and wished that Tammy Felton had done this soul-searching years ago before engaging into a degrading life of crime. She may not have had a future, but this Monica had a healthy future if she was willing to allow it.

"I got a mom." Monica lightly chuckled at the thought. "I got a mom."

"Don't trying an allowance out of her." Warrick chuckled a bit.

"I got a mom." Monica lightly chuckled again. She lightly pulled her hair back and turned backward to stride past the forensics lab. Sara Sidle mentioned a bit of the facts to Greg Sanders wondering what he was seeing and Al Robbins looked up to see the beauty drifting out for himself. Not ready to believe in ghosts, he just continued another autopsy from the day shift. In the wake of the clone's visit, Nick Stokes chuckled under breath.

"All these years I thought there was no way for two people to look alike, but now," He paused for effect. "I have to believe it."

"I'd hate to bust your doppelganger theory." Grissom loved busting myths. "But while getting a history on Monica Uchtman, I discovered she'd been in a motorcycle accident ten years ago. Her face had been run into a tree and a total of a hundred pins were used to reconstruct it. She wasn't born looking like Tammy Felton; she just ended up looking like her."

"What a bust…" Nick sounded depressingly disappointed. "I thought there was a hope for another Nick Stokes out there."

"God perish the thought…" Warrick was around to bust his bubble. "What about Reason? What happened to him?"

"Don't know…" Grissom confessed. "But I'm sure the FBI is keeping track of him…."

"You fixed it!" The former war god was in Los Angeles County in Californiaon the old abandoned airfield where his younger brother, Hermes raced and played with the high-intake vehicles that mortals raced here on earth in the role of a stuntman named Marcus Reason. In over two thousand years, mortals had caught up with the deities they once worshipped and the retired gods played with the toys of their descendants. Now calling himself Hef Reason, Hephaestus had gone from crafting enchanted swords and shields to high-intake engines and electrical wonders on par with the inventions of mortal beings. Restoring his brother's 1956 BSA chopper to exist another hundred years was just a modest trick.

"I may never say this again, and I'll deny it if you repeat it, but…" Ares looked the oil-covered face of his brother. "If I had to pick any brother I liked, you'd be him."

"Oh, I feel warm and fuzzy all over……" The former blacksmith-god responded coldly sarcastic.

"On the other hand," Ares turned out to the tarmac as Hermes pushed his racecar to a hundred and fifty miles an hour. As he raced by in his over-modified Mercury, the former messenger-god looked out to him laughing his head off with his face contorted into an obnoxious grin.

"That little speed demon has always gotten on my nerves…" He fired a minor burst of lightning and gave his race car-obsessed brother a spinout he'd never forget.

END


End file.
